Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price

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Ellison says he learned that Sun’s pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

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Over ‘Rock’, de opvolger van ‘Sparc’:

This processor had two incredible virtues: It was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. It was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said Ellison. “It was just madness to continue that project.”

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When Ellison started scrutinizing Sun, he says he found plenty wrong: lots of waste among the billions of dollars that had gone into R&D in recent years. The hardware maker had cut back the sales staff that sold its most profitable products, including its business computers and storage equipment, causing sales and earnings to decline. It operated an antiquated manufacturing and distribution system. It regularly sold hardware and software at a loss, sometimes losing more than $1 million on a single deal.

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“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” said Ellison. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”

Through the years I've worked on plays and musicals, did a lot of copywriting, wrote columns, short stories, speeches, essays, long background stories, songs, poems and lots and lots of other stuff. Currently writing a musical. A couple of years ago I discovered photography. I'm still trying to get it right, but have developed a deep affection for Leica.

Through the years I have won my fair share of ugly sculptures, mirrors and pellets. To name but a few: I was named most promising startup chief, most decent entrepreneur and most eccentric manager in telecom.